Britain's greatest actress Vanessa Redgrave lies in a drunken stupor on stage sharing a rug with an equally paralytic Russian poet.
She is the uninhibited dancer Isadora Duncan, a champagne socialist well past her scandal-ous prime and only four years away from her death in 1927.
She has elevated her art to a religion, yet the only deity she worships is the wine-god Bacchus.
With diaphanous Grecian costumes designed for free love, her main claim to fame is that she killed off the corset.
Suddenly every woman wanted to look like a wood nymph.
The poet is her excitable and imperious young husband Sergei Esenin.
He speaks no English and has the table-manners of a tyrannical toddler.
He also nearly hangs himself when he swings like a chimpanzee from the chandelier. Handsome sloe-eyed Soviet star Oleg Menshikov makes his British acting debut in jersey boxer shorts, another good reason for having raised the Iron Curtain.
Frances De La Tour, known to taxi-drivers all over London as Miss Jones from Rising Damp, is the hapless interpreter who tries to mediate between husband and wife and only makes things worse.
And this is a truly ghastly partisan play by Martin Sherman who slavishly adores that preposterous egotist Isadora.
He has no interesting critical perspective.
He cannot find the words to describe her dancing and we never see her perform because she is legless.
Instead, a young disciple wafts fatuously around with her arms in the air as if directing traffic at Hendon police college. It is hard to see here how such a ridiculous woman as Isadora Duncan changed the world of music and movement.
The drama briefly flares into life during a farcical banquet scene when Vanessa starts hurling crockery and thrusts a cream pie into someone's face.
But generally Robert Allan Ackerman directs this dreary self-indulgent nonsense as if he were Rip van Winkle.
Vanessa Redgrave is unquestionably the late Dame Peggy Ashcroft's natural successor as the First Lady of the British theatre.
Yet it was a mistake to return via this travesty to the role she first made famous 22 years ago in the film Isadora.
Here she gives the most mannered performance of her career as the tiresome fantasist recalling the days when she pranced.

Submitted by Jane Grey